The present invention generally concerns a rack for positioning pocket billiard balls. Pocket billiards normally utilizes a plurality of standard billiard balls having a diameter of 2.250 inches±0.005 inches. The terms “billiards” and “pool” are commonly used interchangeably to describe a variety of games played on a table having a flat rectangular surface and six pockets using a plurality of standard pocket billiards/pool balls. In general, the rules and equipment such as tables and ball sizes used for pocket billiards/pool games different substantially from the tables and balls used for English billiards and snooker.
A traditional eight-ball game of pool is played on a pool table with fifteen balls including seven solids, seven stripes, an eight-ball and a cue ball. At the start of a game of eight-ball, the solids and stripes are confined in a triangularly-shaped rack. A separate diamond-shaped rack is used to play nine-ball. The billiard rack has an inner perimeter that allows all fifteen billiard balls to be placed loosely therein. Once the balls are placed inside the rack, a player typically uses his or her fingers to push the balls forward and close together so that all adjacent balls are in contact with one another. Ideally, when the rack is lifted, the balls remain uniformly and snugly packed together with all adjacent balls in contact with one another. However, oftentimes, the balls are not uniformly packed together because the player did not uniformly pack them or because the rack inadvertently contacts one or more of the balls as the rack is lifted away from the balls. Furthermore, with varying applications of force by the player's various fingers, the balls may be in close contact with adjacent balls or in no contact at all. If the balls are not properly packed, it is difficult for a player to properly break the billiard balls at the beginning of a game. In general, loose packing of the balls greatly reduces the motion of at least some balls at the break. It is also difficult to achieve consistency with the contact between each individual billiard ball in a rack. Other billiards games having differently-shaped billiard racks, such as nine-ball, suffer from the same non-uniform technique of manually packing the balls before the break.
Consequently, a billiard ball rack that uniformly applies force to the billiard balls and provides for racking different ball formations is desired.